Tag Archives: research

Intelligence on Ashiyane and the Iranian Cyber Army

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One of my favorite OSINT resources internet-haganah have opened up a new thread on their forums that are dedicated to Iran, called Ashiyane.

This is basically the hacker forum that I was researching a couple of years ago (see my DefCon18 talk, and here, and here).

The forum thread is here: http://forum.internet-haganah.com/showthread.php?440-Ashiyane

And an interesting intelligence profile for the group actually quotes my past research (which unlike what it may seem was NOT done as part of my reserve duty tasks in the Israeli AriForce…)

Keep up the great work guys! Truly humbled to have my work mentioned on your site.

The curious case of Dropbox security

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The Dropbox logoAfter the disclosure of the host_id authentication issues that plagued the popular Dropbox service last week, a new issue came up with the fact that Dropbox can detect whether the files you are trying to upload to their cloud already exist there, and “save you the bandwidth” of uploading it if they already have a copy in hand.

So – the Dropbox client probably checks for the hash of the file being uploaded against a list of hashes of existing files that are already stored on the cloud. It may also be that the files stored online are encrypted. So… what’s the big deal?

One has to remember that when using a service such as Dropbox (and I’m an avid user myself), you clearly do not have full control over the material you upload, and the online encryption is only a fraction of the protection you may be seeking. There is no key management visible to the user. There is no way that each client you use has its own key, nor they share keys, and if they do, Dropbox is managing your keys. This also gives them the ability to decrypt your data at any given time. Subsequently, it also gives them the ability to provide you with the file of another user if you tried to upload it yourself (hence saving you the bandwidth) – for example, when you may want to access it from a client which does not have the synched copy of your account (or through the web interface). They just decrypt the other user’s file, and serve it back to you. After all – you have the same one back on your home/work/whatever PC (remember that you showed “proof” by providing the hash before).

Which brings us back to reality – what are we really exposed to here in terms of risk?

  1. Dropbox has the ability to access the contents of my files.
  2. If I can come up with a hash of a file that I know someone else has, and that file may be confidential in some way, I can potentially claim to upload the same file, and then download the real one (as I don’t really have the original) from another client or through the web interface.

Clearly, the media attention to point 1 is important – but still not really interesting as people should have had a clue when they send their files to the “cloud”.

However, point 2 makes a more interesting argument… It would be interesting to see when the first “hack” will come along which will start “uploading” files (by hacking the client protocol – hint: start here, here, and here) just based on hashes, and then downloading them as if from another client to see what you get (if they were “cached” already on the Dropbox cloud). Now that would be an interesting little experiment…

Happy hacking!

SCADA, control systems and security – not necessarily enemies

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Insights from the NISA International SCADA Security Forum conference (NISA stands for National Information Security Authority, which is a division of the Israeli Security Agency).

We all know that SCADA has been considered a security nightmare for a long time. Admittedly, I only have a short experience with such systems and control systems in general (just short of two years), but the topic is fascinating. The main challenges in securing control systems from my point of view is the ability to “connect” with the domain experts and understand the systems and processes properly.
Unfortunately, we, as a security community are far from it (at least based on what I have seen in the past couple of days in the conference). The rush to force traditional IT solutions and ways of thinking onto control systems just do not work. From “learning” firewalls that monitor the industrial control protocols, to systems that are designed to ADD complexity to the threat modeling by layering network and Internet related threats to SIEM mechanisms and add the “scada” data to it. These are all solutions that are Bound to fail as they do not understand the actual needs and operational state of mind of control systems engineering.

If we take a new and unbiased look at what kind of data and processes are involved in such systems, we (as in the security community) would be thrilled to learn that there are a lot of untapped intelligence resources that would substantially help us in building a more appropriate and relevant detection and alerting mechanisms. Trying to force an IT solution on these would be an exercise in fitting a square peg into a round hole, and as exciting as that may be we all know what would be the outcome of it.

To sum things up – just as you would not pretend to know the environment of a financial or a commercial customer when approaching the task of securing it, control systems pose an ever more distinct challenge. Open up, keep the critical thinking and most of all LISTEN. You’ll find out that long before you can start pushing the “cyber” agenda, you have much to work with just with the basic data and processes already at hand, and that there is a lot of value that a security practitioner can bring to such an organization.

P.S. I’m specifically refraining from addressing any product or vendor as I do not think it’s fair to “out” them (however big or small they may be) as these have obviously been rushed to the market in an attempt to get an initial foothold in the industry. Nevertheless, I do encourage such vendors to do some more homework, and work WITH the industry rather than just try to capitalize on their existing expertise in IT and “cyber”.

Defense through Offense, and how APT fits there

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I’m guessing that having “APT” in anything that goes outside for public consumption these days is mandatory, but this post actually has a good reason to do so. If you look back just one post in the past, we were discussing the new initiative to define “Penetration Testing”. The post, and the proposed standard itself really take a good look at what organizations need, and how to address such needs from a practical point of view, rather than from a compliance or a “check-box ticking” perspective.

For me this is one of the things that the security industry has done a great disservice to. It is exactly why companies are announcing that for every time they get breached, it was an advanced attack. An attack so sophisticated, that managed to stay persistent in their network and exfiltrate lots of sensitive information, that no reasonable control could have prevented or detected it. The all dreaded “APT”.

However, if you take a look at how organizations prepare themselves for such attacks you may find yourself staring at a blank page. Since regulatory compliance dictates a very basic “box checking” methodology for a very narrow and specific aspect of information security, and the product vendors on the other hand provide solutions that are “compliance oriented”, organizations are left with a very weak defense mechanisms. This is without even mentioning the biggest security gap in most organizations – the employees.

The lack of self-testing, of a real-world simulation of what an attack would look like, and how the organization would cope with, hinders most organizations from putting reasonable defenses in place. The lack of proper training, awareness campaigns, and exercises that stress out the human factor as well are leading us to a situation where even simple attacks that utilize off-the-shelf (and even FREE) attack tools, manage to go through an organizations control mechanisms with aggravating ease.

I’m looking back at what the penetration testing execution standard defines for its basic testing methodology, and I can clearly see how every element of the recent “APT” attacks would have been simulated, and probably in a more rigorous scenario. Such a test would have clearly left the tested organization with a roadmap that would bring it to a much higher security standard. And that’s the power of testing – of understanding the adversary’s techniques and strategies, and running exercises that reflect them in order to identify security gaps and close them as efficiently as possible. And yes – that also (and perhaps mainly) applies to human related processes and policies rather than just to technology.

So to sum things up – you may be compliant, but do not think for a moment that this compliance has anything to do with the security of your information. Until regulatory compliance does not mandate proper security testing in order to protect the data in question, such compliance is only going to hinder your “security vision”. Get proper testing, set up an internal team that would be responsible for understanding the threat communities you are dealing with (or hire an external one ), and make sure you set yourself a goal to have an unbiased understanding of what your gaps are and how well you can face a standard attack (yes – the same standard attack that you are going to call an “APT” if it would hit you unprepared).

Defining Penetration Testing

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I have been fortunate enough to be working with a group of peers from the security industry over the past few months (since November 2010) on finally creating a solid definition of what a penetration testing is.

It has been a topic that has been abused, cannibalized, and lowered to a level where we (as in people in the industry) could not relate to it anymore. It was time to get the fake stuff out, and focus on content. We were all getting tired of “penetration tests” that were nothing more than a Nessus scan printed out and slapped on with the “security consultancy” logo.

Enter – the Penetration Testing Execution Standard.

This is our attempt to define what a penetration test should include – both from the tester side (vendors) as well as from the client side (the business/organization being tested).

It is the fruit of a huge collaborative effort from people who I consider to be some of the best in the industry. Getting together people who on their day-jobs often compete with each other, and come from different areas of the industry, all together and working on something as big as this has been a humbling experience. For that – you guys all ROCK!

Onwards to the content – remember that this is pre-alpha, and is aimed mainly to get feedback from everyone. A lot of branches do not appear in their full glory there, and some will surely not make it to the final edition. We welcome everyone to take a close look at this, contribute, criticize, assist, comment and generally get involved. Some of you may have been watching this and thinking we are holding back – could not have been further from the truth… In order to get to something as big as this we had to cap the number of participants in this revision in order to keep things somewhat organized, so this is a chance to get back in and offer your assistance – we promise to keep this as open as possible.

This is really exciting – for me at least. Hope some of you will be able to share this enthusiasm and weed out the industry from the bad form we got into.

About CyberWar, Deterrence, and Espionage

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It’s been a long time since my last post, but trust me for all the good reasons (i.e. work). This one is long due, and has been recently fueled after I had a chance to attend RAND’s Martin Libicki’s brief at the Tel-Aviv University.

Spy vs. Spy - copyright Kigs, devianart.

Martin is a great source for debate and thought exercises as he is fluent in many realms of the subject at hand, and has been trained as an economist which makes it much easier to broaden the debate into politics and diplomacy.

I’ll address a few key elements of the brief – at least the ones that speak to me the most in terms of research and ongoing work that we are engaged in on a national, international and local levels.

First – the ever provoking “there is no CyberWar” statement. Immediately followed by “this is the definition of CyberWar as I see it”… Obviously, with a definition that closely resembles war as defined in other domains (land, sea, air, space), it’s hard to see how one can state that CyberWar was ever engaged (or ever will be for that matter). But the key here is not to treat the Cyber domain as “another” domain and try to use the template of the traditional domains when defining it. Cyber is a game-changer, it’s not a domain like any other, it has its own rules, territorial issues are mute here, jurisdiction is a mess, and accessibility is even worst. It’s almost impossible to define what a conflict is in Cyber, what an engagement is in terms of forces colliding and how is aggression defined. Nevertheless, all the issues mentioned in the last sentence have risen many times over the last decade, and yet some refuse to realize that in several occasions it was indeed a state or form of warfare.

The second issue is deterrence. On this one I almost completely agree with Martin’s approach which speculates whether real deterrence can be subjected into the domain. Nevertheless, I do believe that sustained and proven threat over the opponent’s critical infrastructure, financial and base production facilities can be used as a deterrence factor. You do not need missile silo counts to prove deterrence in the Cyber domain, you need sustainable access to critical systems, and a prove that you can retain such access in light of some vulnerabilities and key access elements being taken off the table by the defensive strategy. For that – enter espionage… With a combination of cyber-domain capabilities, and a solid intelligence practice (i.e. both gathering as well as proactive), one side can create a situation where such access to critical elements in the other side’s Cyber domain are kept consistently under surveillance and accessible to modification/sabotage.

Which leads to the last issue, which has surprisingly raised a lot of eyebrows lately – even from people who I consider proficient in the “Art” of international relationships and diplomacy: the “legality” of espionage. Face it – espionage has been and will always be a fully acceptable part of a nation strategy. It is accepted at all level of diplomacy, and by every nation. Everyone knows that everyone else is engaged in it, and is putting a lot of resources to make sure that their efforts are successful while trying to minimize everyone else’ efforts in their own territory. The same applies for the Cyber domain. It’s no big surprise that the US finds itself dealing with a major espionage case (on the commercial level) almost every year, and just think about all the cases that are not made public in the government, and military sectors… But have no fear – the other side is being spied on just as well with skills that do not fall short (and usually surpass) of what the US is subjected to. It’s a fact of life, so stop whining about it (and excuse the burn notice cameo).

To conclude – I truly think that dealing with such a young and ever evolving domain is a great challenge – both technologically, as well as from the diplomacy / international relationship aspects of it. And until we’ll have some shape or form of formalized discourse on this domain (such as the efforts put in by NATO, the UN and a few of the world’s largest nations), it’s a free-for-all playground that is going to keep providing us with moral, technological and sociological challenges. BRING IT ON!

Information Security Intelligence Report for 2010 and Predictions for 2011

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Looking back at 2010 shows a widening gap between cybercrime and law enforcement capabilities, in conjunction to nations that have started the cyber-race to develop defensive and offensive capabilities. Most of the attacks analyzed in 2010 depict organizations that fall behind in their defensive strategies as attackers take advantage of a hybrid approach that merges technical merits alongside human weaknesses to cash-out on their attacks.

Cybercrime widens the gap between attack capability and defense mechanisms. Analyzing several of the major attacks of 2010, Security Art notes that organizations were attacked in two key ways. Firstly, through technical exploits such as Aurora, Mariposa, ZeuS, and SpyEye. Secondly, by attacks that bypassed traditional protection methods, and gained access to targets through human-weakness areas such as social media. While businesses focused on defending themselves using security mechanisms such as anti- virus software and perimeter defenses, attackers jumped over these defenses, and proceeded to flood the market with a high volume of malware that now poses a serious threat to security providers in terms of detection rates and response time. However, law enforcement agencies have focused mainly on menial cybercriminals, and have not successfully reduced the impact of online criminal activities. On a national level, we see nations have embarked upon the race to develop defensive and offensive cyber capabilities.

Cyberwar arms race sends nations to shopping frenzy. As CyberWar gained merit (and criticism) during 2010, with the movie-material Stuxnet incident being the poster-boy for news outlets that published every spin-off, speculation, and plain old gossip, the international scene had its own race for the latest and greatest defense mechanisms. The implications of Aurora and Stuxnet made most countries feel their lack of a critical infrastructure defense and the capability to deliver a similar cyber-blow, and many went shopping for weapons. Security Art witnessed the strategic build up of capabilities in some countries, and a more hurried shopping spree (that usually led to amassment of CyberCrime provided tools) in others. This, and the delayed response of organizations such as the UN, the EU, and NATO, left the scene looking more like the Wild West than Silicon Valley.

Expanding digital domain and improved understanding of security will reign in 2011. Our prediction for 2011, drawn from the criminal, political and diplomatic sides of cybercrime that dominated 2010, is that more focus is going to be given to approaching security from a strategic standpoint. Rather than buying “best of breed” products and ticking off compliance sheets, we predict that organizations and countries will apply a more sensible executive-level understanding of what information security means to them. In the expanding personal digital domain (smartphone, tablets, and suchlike), and the continued digitization of all organizational information (from scanned materials to VOIP telephony), security must be applied to more layers than ever before. Countries and organizations will have to adopt additional skill-sets and look for solutions in areas they have not dealt with before.

Please go to http://www.security-art.com/download-report to download the full report, or email info@security-art.com for additional information.